Business Floorspace is back!!

13 February 2018

The business floorspace dataset, provided by the Valuation Office Agency, was last seen in 2012, but has now returned as 2016 experimental statistics on Gov.uk. It is joined by information about rateable values with the indicators broken down into five categories of business unit : industrial, retail, offices, other and excluded units (which means no floorspace valuation is available so the calculated indicators are also not available).

At the end of March 2016, Northamptonshire had 20,950 business units within the rating list. This was an increase of 14.1% in number of non-domestic rateable units over the previous 15 years. This is a higher percentage growth in the number of rateable units than the national average (12.7%) and places Northamptonshire in the middle of the list of economic comparators, where unit growth since 2001 has varied between 29.9% in Milton Keynes and 3.4% in Leicester.

Please note : In 2016, excluded units accounted for 15.1% of units across Northamptonshire and 19.2% nationally, so may affect other proportions. Please also note : This data is not published at LEP level, so the dataset is provided for the split version of the Economic Comparators where Swindon & Wiltshire LEP and The Marches LEP are split down into their constituent unitary parts parts.

In 2016 industrial units made up 32.9% of the rateable units in Northamptonshire and 47.7% of the total rateable value collected, compared to 24.3% and 19.9% respectively across England as a whole. Amongst the economic comparators only Leicester and Leicestershire have a higher proportion of industrial units and none of the economic comparators surpass Northamptonshire's proportion of the total rateable value produced by their industrial units. Northamptonshire still stands out when the square meterage of industrial space is compared to the size of the population. Here, the county holds 19.25 thousand m2 of Industrial floorspace per 1000 population aged 16-64 which is well above the national average of 8.71 thousand m2/1000pop and places Northamptonshire in first position amongst the basket of economic comparators for this indicator. Overall it is clear that industrial units are important to the county's non-domestic rateable income.

The rateable value per m2 of industrial floorspace across Northamptonshire is £37 per m2, the same as the England average but in this case only bringing 11th place in the list of economic comparators. Buckinghamshire and Luton have the highest industrial floorspace costs per m2 (both £47). At borough and district level within the county, the industrial RV/m2 varies from £30/m2 in Corby to £41/m2 in Daventry and South Northamptonshire. In Northamptonshire and nationally, 'industrial' is the category of unit with the lowest RV/m2. Until 2011 the county's RV/m2 for industrial units was above the national average, since then the calculation has been tracking closely to the national average. Unfortunately, occupancy rates are not available to add to this picture of the county sustaining a volume of low cost industrial space.

At the other end of the spectrum, Northamptonshire has a low proportion of retail units compared to nationally (21.6% v. 26.2% ) and a lower than average rateable value per square metre for these units with £119/m2 compared to £153/m2 nationally and £188/m2 in Milton Keynes. The Northamptonshire value masks differences between the boroughs and districts from £97 in Daventry (decreasing) to £137 in Northampton (finally back up to the 2008 amount).